The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment

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Part One The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment: An Introduction According to Kelling, Pate, Dieckman, & Brown (1974), patrol is the “backbone” of police work. This belief is based around the premise that the mere presence of police officers on patrol prohibits criminal activity. Despite increasing budgets and the availability of more officers on the streets, crime rates still rose with the expanding metropolitan populations (Kelling et al., 1974). A one year experiment to determine the effectiveness of routine preventive patrol would be conducted, beginning on the first day of October 1972, and ending on the last day of September 1973. The Kansas City, Missouri Police Department, along with researchers and funding from the Police …show more content…

Such sources involved inquiries from the community including victimization surveys, departmental data, questionnaires from neighborhood residents and business owners, police encounter evaluations, surveys regarding police response times, participant observer surveys, and questionnaires regarding victimization. Pre-experimental data were also obtained for comparison purposes such as crime data, traffic data, arrest data, and response time data (Kelling et al., …show more content…

Kelling et al., (1974) found that of the 51 comparisons drawn between the three different experimental patrol beats, only one category was statistically different. This category, “Other Sex Crimes”, Kelling et al., (1974) found that the instance was more than likely a random occurrence and not in response to the routine preventive patrol. In conclusion, the report finds that the changes in patrol levels had no bearing on the rates in which crimes were reported. An interesting finding discussed in the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment report was the fact that citizens were virtually unaware of the difference in patrol frequency when they changed for experimental purposes. Similarly, a related discovery in this report found that citizens’ fear of crime was not affected by the various patrol levels. These findings were consistent among both citizens and businesses alike. And because of this, it was also found that citizen satisfaction with the police was virtually unchanged as well (Kelling et al., 1974).

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